Apparently I’m not an adult. Well, shit.
I am 23-years-old.
I have lived in ten, yeah ten, different dorms and apartments in the last five years. After graduating college in May 2009, I started working for a company I love, although I’m positive that it will not be my final employer. I crave opportunities to explore my passions, travel the world, and find new experiences. According to sociologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, I am smack dab in the middle of a newly discovered developmental stage: Emerging Adulthood.
Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties, explains that this stage is characterized by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and “a sense of possibilities.” He believes that this stage, in combination with the current American economic and societal climate, is the reason we see so many young people delaying their entry into true adulthood.
I cannot deny that Arnett’s theory is true, at least in part. However, I have several major concerns about the theory itself and the conclusions that so-called “grown-ups” are starting to draw from it.
To read the rest of my post, please go to TheNextGreatGeneration.com…..
